Armor-Plated Andrei

Last week Andrei Andreevich Gromyko said he was going home. The Kremlin had something else for him to do (if he knew, Gromyko didn't say what), and his place as chief Soviet delegate at U.N. would go to a new man. Grinned New York's Daily News: "Here's your hat, Gromy . . . We'll try to bear up."

Americans had been watching Andrei Gromyko, off & on, for nine years, ever since he arrived in Washington in 1939, a tall, dark, diffident young man with darting, unfixed eyes. He had not changed much, just grown a little heavier; his brief smiles (which at first made his new diplomatic acquaintances feel they might somehow "get across" to this Russian) were briefer than before. He would leave his name behind in the U.S. vernacular: "to pull a gromyko"--meaning, variously, to walk out or to be a robot reiterating the reflexive "no."

But Gromyko had never got across to Americans, nor they to him, apparently. He was the prototype of the "new man" that Lenin's revolution had promised. The armor-plating was part of the pattern. If his residence in the U.S. had taught him anything different from what his Communist ideology required him to believe, that was, and for safety's sake would remain, his secret.

Last week, Lake Success was awaiting his successor, Yakov Alexandrovich Malik, former Soviet Ambassador to Japan, and wondering if he would be any different--outwardly.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.